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Four brave South Shore women reinvent their lives by pursuing their passions
Salon owner Ronit Enos
Photos by Jay Elliott
Some women embrace transition. When life presents an opportunity to connect with a muse, to discover a talent or to dust off a dream that has been tucked away on a back shelf, these women take a leap, hoping to land on both feet without a sprained ankle, even if they’re not quite sure where they’ll touch down. Other women accept transition because circumstances demand it. They find themselves without a job, or without a husband, or in some other unexpected state of affairs. For these individuals, survival means making the best of their situation.
Reinvention, whether by choice, necessity, or some combination of the two, often opens the curtain to a more appealing act in life’s drama. Women who picked a career after high school or college, without much knowledge of themselves or the world, may enjoy a clearer vision and sense of purpose as they write a new chapter. In a world that often defines us by what we do, pursuing something entirely new can mean risking our sense of identity—but it can also lead to true happiness.
A Stunning Success
Ronit Enos transferred the team building skills she learned as a soldier in the Israeli army
to commandeering a small battalion of stylists in an uber-luxury Hingham salon.
Enos, the owner of Maxime Salon, is a self-described sabra. The term used for a Jewish person born on Israeli soil comes from an Arabic word for a thorny desert plant with a thick hide and a sweet, soft interior. In more ways than one, it’s an apt metaphor for the sassy redhead who zealously devotes herself to helping women become beautiful.
Growing up in a Tel Aviv suburb, Enos worked at a hair salon from the time she was 15 years old, earning money to support her penchant for style. Hair color always intrigued her, and she picked up good instincts along with valuable training. But coming of age in Israel, Enos was subject to mandatory military service, so she traded in her girly gear for fatigues.
During her two-year army duty, Enos took on a leadership role as she trained tough male soldiers to fight cohesively. She learned about teamwork, including the importance of accountability and knowing who was in charge. After her service, she traveled to the United States, eventually meeting her American husband Bill, and settled in Massachusetts.
“At the age of 27, walking on the beach in Scituate, I had an epiphany,” Enos recalls. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I had a vision of a contemporary salon, with lots of white surfaces and glass and light. And everyone would come there to talk and share their stories, like in a Paris bistro.”
Enos knew she wanted her idea to take shape not in a big city like Boston, but on the South Shore. “I had met so many amazing people,” she says. “This place is kind of a secret treasure.” Maxime Salon, located at 1 Derby Street, is precisely that. Sunlight plays on the white porcelain floor imported from Italy. Sophisticated art decorates the walls, and conversation flows comfortably. But while customers see a blend of cosmopolitan elegance and coffee-shop camaraderie, stylists and colorists follow a tight program with high expectations.
“Find someone who knows how to bring you out, and won’t suppress you. Hair is a good place to start. Think about Samson and Delilah–your hair can give you strength.”
The client experience begins with indulgences: a scalp massage, a pampering drink, and an in-depth consultation. On the other hand, the staff begins every work day in a huddle. Like soldiers planning for battle, they discuss strategies, review techniques, and resolve issues. Enos says her business benefits from the structure she learned in the military.
Enos travels internationally to bring back cutting edge products and ideas and her salon has become a go-to place for hair with European polish. She has also traveled to a remote Guatemalan village to meet some of the people helped by Medicines for Humanity, a global non-profit that brings healthcare to children in impoverished regions. Philanthropy is an important part of her business plan, so for every Maxime Salon service, Enos donates a dollar to the organization.
Transition with a Mission
Judith Campbell, a long-time Pembroke resident who currently lives in Plymouth, was educated to be a kindergarten teacher. But as a single mother with two sons to support, she started teaching college-level art—the first step on the winding way to her current profession as an ordained minister and published author of mystery novels.
Reverend Judith Campbell’s first mystery, A Deadly Mission, was published last year. Her second novel, An Unspeakable Mission, is slated for bookstores in May, and she is already at work on the third in her series.
Having given herself a playful literary nickname, “The Sinister Minister,” Campbell considers the mysteries to be “part and parcel” of her ministry. Her plots expose religious hypocrisy and explode cultural stereotypes. While writing may offer her a literary pulpit, Campbell’s stories are more than simple polemics. Reviewers have praised A Deadly Mission as fast-paced, unpredictable, and suspense-filled. The heroine, college professor and ordained minister Olympia Brown, is suspicious of a religious cult that preys on vulnerable college students. When one of them turns up dead, the sleuthing begins in earnest.
By putting her protagonist in an academic setting, Campbell draws on what she knows. She taught at Lesley College for 27 years. Now nearly 70 years old, she has reinvented herself more than once, always finding fresh ways to use her creativity. She paints, makes jewelry, and sings. She has written poetry and children’s stories. Decades ago, raising two young boys while working as a YWCA program administrator, she learned that Lesley College needed a ceramics instructor.
“I knew I could do it, so I applied and got the job,” Campbell says. Before long, she worked full time at Lesley. Campbell says she felt drawn to ministry when she was in her 30s, but she didn’t follow the calling right away.
“I didn’t want to put my sons in daycare,” she remembers. “I talked to friends and realized the time wasn’t right. I could do what I wanted to do and still teach.”
By the time she turned 50, however, her children were adults and the nest was empty. Ready for a new direction, Campbell started work on a PhD program in art and religious studies. The doctoral degree qualified her to become a full professor, while also preparing her for ministerial ordination.
When she was nearly 60 years old, Campbell left Lesley and became minister of the Unitarian Universalist church on Martha’s Vineyard. When she left the Island after serving for seven years, many people assumed she might be retiring. Instead, she serves her denomination as a consultant to churches in search of ministers. And, of course, she writes.
Although her work with the Martha’s Vineyard church was rewarding, Campbell says community ministry is her true calling, and she is happy to return to it. She particularly likes ministering to women in transition. She quotes the line from an old spiritual: “If you get to heaven before I do, just dig a hole and pull me through.”
It isn’t enough to know where you want to go. Your journey will offer you many choices, so you need to know just as clearly where you don’t want to go.
Campbell helps women reinvent themselves by pointing out paths that are available, and even holding their hand as they take the first step. “But the first steps are theirs,” she says. “I can’t choose the right steps for anyone.” She often counsels women in the midst of change and tells them to list 10 things they would love to do if money, talent, training, and opportunity were not an issue, and then looks for patterns and parallels. Next she asks for a list of things they wouldn’t do for all the money in the world.
Campbell’s reasoning: It isn’t enough to know where you want to go. Your journey will offer you many choices, so you need to know just as clearly where you don’t want to go.
A Sweeter Way to Make a Living
Squeezed out of a well-established corporate career, Danielle Verzone of Scituate set aside spreadsheets to make artisanal chocolates.
For 17 years, Danielle Verzone’s identity was solid. She bought fabric for an apparel firm that had started as a relatively small family-owned business. She began her commute to Boston every morning at 5 a.m., before there was enough daylight for her to appreciate the gorgeous old trees and barn outside her restored 1844 farmhouse in North Scituate. Verzone would drop her golden retriever off at doggie daycare. She returned home after 7 p.m. every evening.
Early in her career, Verzone had worn lots of hats, but she found herself pigeonholed as the business evolved. The company she worked for grew and grew, until it was gobbled up by an even bigger company that was part of a large corporation.
“I knew it was just a matter of time,” says Verzone. “Boston is hardly an apparel mecca, so we would be absorbed into a Los Angeles or New York office.”
As it turned out, Verzone had nearly a year to contemplate her choices. However, her eureka moment didn’t come until she was actually packing up her office. It was then that she opened an e-mail from Burdick Chocolate, and read about a week-long chocolate making course at the company’s flagship café in Walpole, New Hampshire.
“The stars had aligned,” she says. “My whole life I had just wanted to be in the kitchen. I’ve never looked back.”
Verzone enjoyed the week so much that she decided to enroll in a demanding online professional program with Ecole Chocolat, a Vancouver based school that teaches everything from technique to marketing, and even the physiology of taste. In November 2009, in the midst of a terrible economy, she launched Sirenetta Seaside Chocolatier, just in time for the holidays.
“I was terrified,” she remembers. “I was just learning, and I realized that 80 percent of the chocolate business was done in two months.”
Naming her company after the Italian word for mermaid, her branding and packaging concept is partly playful and partly exotic. Working alone, without the help of Oompa Loompas, Verzone concocts luscious ganache by infusing cream, butter, and chocolate with inventive blends of liqueur and herbal infusions, which forms the center of her hand-dipped edible masterpieces.
Verzone’s unique chocolates have become the talk of South Shore farmers’ markets, art shows, and gala gourmet events where they have been featured. Past-profession connections have brought corporate gift orders her way—helping the siren call of Sirenetta to reach an even wider audience.
“Coming to terms with not having a steady paycheck was frightening,” she admits. “But every time someone tastes a sample and says ‘this is amazing,’ I know I’ve made the right decision.”
Get over your fear of failure, and find a support network. “There are people out there who want you to succeed, so connect with them.”
Making chocolate has also been a refreshing alternative to the “cut-throat corporate culture” Verzone knew for years. “There has been a total change in the quality of my life,” Verzone says. “Before, I never went for a walk on the beach. I never knew this was such a beautiful town, or how many amazing people lived here.”
“I’ve been extraordinarily lucky,” Verzone adds. “I’ve found a community of people who are genuinely supportive.” A year since Verzone set aside her spreadsheets to make artisanal chocolates; her husband tells her she has finally become the person she was meant to be.
For anyone on the brink of following a dream, Verzone has two suggestions: Get over your fear of failure, and find a support network. “There are people out there who want you to succeed, so connect with them.”
Rock Solid Satisfaction
After more than a decade of meticulous work on intricate gyroscopes for space shuttles and other high-level projects, Kris Brennen finds
true satisfaction carving massive granite stones into art in the studio outside her Duxbury home.
Brennen has always loved being outdoors, but for 19 years she made a daily Duxbury-to-Norwood commute to work indoors on aerospace research and development at the company Northrup.
“At lunchtime I took walks along the Auto Mile,” Brennen remembers. “That was about the only time I went outside.”
As liaison between the engineering and manufacturing departments, she found that being petite and feminine was an advantage in a male-dominated field. Her work required good negotiating skills along with a fussy attention to detail, as she followed blueprints to assemble critical components for space shuttle navigational systems. When her division was bought by a Connecticut company, most of her co-workers were devastated. But Brennen finally felt free to follow a calling from long ago.
“I always wished I had gone to art school,” she says. “But if I had done it right after high school, I’m not sure I would have been successful.” Brennen enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then transferred to Massachusetts College of Art, earning an architectural design degree and discovering a passion for stone along the way.
Brennen now collaborates with a local landscaper, creating stone walls, water features and other design elements. She also works in ceramics and wood. For someone who prefers to be outside, surrounded by nature, making art for the landscape finally felt like the perfect fit.
Whenever unwanted rocks and limbs need to be removed, Brennen welcomes the refuse as raw material for her sculpture. The wooded lot where she lives in West Duxbury is strewn with boulders; owning a Bobcat tractor as well as an excavator means she can unearth big rocks and move them about. Her property is both a work space and gallery, where artful surprises lie behind every tree and trail.
Freed from the exacting specifications of her previous career, Brennen can now follow her intuition. In the contours of raw stone, she sees suggestions of shape and coaxes them forth. Deftly grinding granite with a diamond blade, Brennen barely changed undulating curves hollowed over time by natural forces, transforming a stone into the face of a sleeping woman. Other stones may suggest frogs, birds, or lizards, while some may be left almost unchanged–perhaps paired with another rock, anchored by an invisible metal pin for an abstract expression of form and balance.
The comfort of a predictable paycheck might be holding you back from something much better.
While some of Brennen’s pieces are purely decorative, others serve as bird feeders or fountains. One of her stone benches has a prominent place near the entrance to Duxbury’s Art Complex Museum. Brennen says that being asked to be part of an Art Complex group show and then having her work become part of museum’s collection, affirmed that she could finally call herself an artist. She has sold her sculpture for several years at garden shops, but being part of last fall’s North River Arts Society studio tour was a watershed. New people discovered her work and either bought it or commissioned site-specific pieces.
“There is nothing that compares to the feeling you get when someone puts something of yours at their home,” she says.
